On December 21, 1954, Dr. Sam Sheppard is convicted for beating his wife, Marilyn, to death inside their suburban home in Cleveland, Ohio five months earlier. Sheppard claimed to have fallen asleep in the family’s living room and awakened to find a man with bushy hair fleeing the scene. The authorities, who uncovered the fact that Dr. Sheppard had been having an affair, did not believe his story.
Nor did the jury.
The media had invaded the courtroom, printing daily biased stories premised on Sheppard’s guilt. The jurors, who were not sequestered, found Sheppard guilty of second-degree murder, and the judge handed him a life sentence. Arguing that the circumstances of the trial had unfairly influenced the jury, Sheppard appealed to the Supreme Court and got his conviction overturned in 1966. Despite the fact that the community-minded doctor had no previous criminal record, many still believed that he was responsible for his wife’s murder.
The Sheppard case brought to light the issue of bias within the court system. Jurors are now carefully screened to ensure that they have not already come to a predetermined conclusion about a case in which they are about to hear. In especially high-profile cases, jurors can be sequestered so that they are not exposed to outside media sources. However, most judges simply order jurors not to watch news reports about the case, and rely on them to honor the order.
Sheppard’s case provided the loose inspiration for the hit television show The Fugitive, in which the lead character, Richard Kimble, is falsely accused of killing his wife, escapes from prison and pursues the one-armed man he claimed to have seen fleeing the murder scene.
In 1998, DNA tests on physical evidence found at Sheppard’s house revealed that there had indeed been another man at the murder scene. Sheppard’s son, who had pursued the case long after his father’s death in order to vindicate his reputation, sued the state for wrongful imprisonment in 2000, but lost.
